can be alone a show at the real headlines with none of them or c n n live in washington d.c. now it's not really a speech robert farley about yet another disaster for the war in afghanistan new pictures have been printed by the l.a. times showing soldiers posing with the corpse of afghan insurgents then the e.p.a. is just released the first ever federal fracking rules but they let the industry off the hook to comply until twenty five teams are even talking about the double game of pleasing activists and the big industry and then jane cougar host of the young turks joins us to talk wall street taxes and the media's complicity and it

all worked out all of that and more for you tonight including a dose of happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. all right so there have been congressional hearings going on over this g.s.a. scandal and lawmakers are getting really into playing bad cop during the questioning and so of course the mainstream media is absolutely loving it because it makes for some really good political theater and therefore t.v. . the senate is holding a hearing today to look into the extravagant g.s.a. conference that was held in las vegas right now the senate is trying to get to the bottom of the spending scandal rocking the general services administration the third day in hearings for over the g.s.a. that how this went to taxpayer money this is just the tip of the iceberg we needed information was in there so the question is if it wasn't in there why are you hiding it from us chairman if you don't have it do you not have that information

after blowing almost a million of your taxpayer dollars on a lavish las vegas conference lavish expensive. excuse more than one lawmaker has asked if criminal charges should be filed not a move not corrective measure in a diet out of control and over the top spending continued by going to the south pacific by going to jaffa by bringing his wife along taxpayers and of paying for his wife we turned over every stone and every time we turned over a stone we found fifty more this is not a republican or a democrat issue this isn't that an american issue of knowing what their government is doing. now the thing that i find interesting is that fox news obviously have been going big on this story since the very second they're broke because it's an embarrassment for the obama administration and well they live and breathe through the obama administration but now i have less than the see yet enjoy me into going full force as if this is the trial of the century that don't get me wrong this

here's a stand all the biggest retrieve the guy spending taxpayer money to take his wife on his seventeen they vacation that is waste it's broad it's abuse it's corruption it's all of it but there's something that i just can't help but notice when seeing all this outbreak and this one goes not just to the mainstream media but to the politicians to the now cason that has been poured into this scandal the red face the anger the tough line of questioning that we're seeing at these hearings i mean it's it's really something else and it's really laughable that it's only when it comes to this handler all. when this comes around that we suddenly see this passion emerge from our lawmakers personally i would love to see that thing kind of passion on t.v. on capitol hill when it comes to wall street right sure the banking executives made their way to washington for a few hearings but i could hardly pay to pay were lambasted in the same fashion and where the hell is the criminal investigation pretty guys were brought down the entire economy there was a whole lot more than a million dollars worth of taxpayer money at stake there but that is just one

example of course and maybe that's the easier but you see there's another area where we see this kind of waste fraud abuse corruption on a daily basis and happening for years for decades we see reports commissions come to the same conclusions all the time and yet those are also just brushed off just as quick as another news story a little blip on the paper that doesn't deserve the same anger and you know that i'm talking about the fence we give you examples almost every single day individual projects weapon systems things like the joint strike fighter program the seven forty seven airborne laser but if you want to go for a big number then let's take a look at the commission on wartime contracting in iraq and afghanistan from august of two thousand and eleven on that commission found at least thirty one billion possibly as much as sixty billion dollars have been lost to lost to contract waste and fraud in america's contingency operations in both iraq and afghanistan one little example there was thirty million dollars on a dining facility at a base in iraq that was based on faulty planning but they couldn't stop because it

was too far along so thirty sixty billion dollars people that make the eight hundred thousand dollars of the g.s.a. scandal absolutely pale in comparison with the g.s.a. scandal it's resulted and the incredibly passionate questioning on capitol hill and the passion is questioning on the cable networks like i said not the g.s.a. scandals bad comparatively it is really easy to see where the priorities lie and what the mainstream media chooses to miss. also happened yet again yet another p.r. nightmare for the u.s. war in afghanistan and this time voters were given the l.a. times by a soldier with the fourth combat brigade eighty second airborne division the times and now published all but some of these photos were given by a soldier was shown members of his unit posing with the corpse of an afghan

insurgent as they describe it a soldier wanted to highlight a breakdown in leadership and discipline in the times published those photos despite requests by the pentagon not to do it but if you look back at this year there's been a scandal every single month from video of marines urinating on taliban corpses to the burning of korans of parwan to the massacre of seventeen civilians mostly women and children and now this oh thing is these photos were taken more than two years ago so how does that change things well joining me to discuss it is robert farley as a professor at the university of kentucky and blogger at lawyers guns and money robert thanks so much for joining us tonight and i guess for starters you know here we go again what are your comments on on these protests well i think you're absolutely right to say that it seems like it's just been one thing after another first we had the very good asian video and then we had the koran burning and then we had the massacre. just right after that and so it seems as if every month when there has

been another serious incident with regards to the behavior of u.s. forces in afghanistan now also this did have a couple years ago but the timing has made it seem to social rather terror terror alarming things about the continued united states presence of blood more generally the continued presence in afghanistan and i think we're all worried about what's going to happen in the next few days. well you know that's interesting you bring that up because of course the pentagon was asking the times not to print this and they used their their typical plea in that case is that they think this is going to endanger the lives of u.s. forces abroad the l a times decided to go for it and they put out a statement and they said that their careful consideration we decided that publishing a small but representative selection of the photos will fill our obligation to readers to report vigorously and impartially on all aspects of the american mission in afghanistan i don't know personally i think that we need i think we need more of this i think we need more papers that are willing to publish photos that are willing to show both sides but what's your side. my take is pretty much the same as

i think there are certainly things one military operations which depression be very reluctant to cover and this would be things that directly put the operational details are on some sort of action to ensure they get what a specific intelligence did you know to me but this is more about the conduct of u.s. troops in afghanistan. this is something that the american public should be aware of that it should go into how we think about what our presence in afghanistan should be i mean this is part of the cost of war that we are paying and so i think the los angeles times was actually correct to publish these photos. and you know i think it will probably affect the way that we look back on in history to if you want to talk about the way that it's remembered you know by perhaps those that live in in afghanistan now one of the other things that i pointed out to you that i want to go back to is that ok so this happened three years ago happened two thousand and ten but in that sense that's why it's so different from you know this massacre that

we just saw two months ago and a sense that these guys could be home are right they could just be living their normal lives and i wonder you know how that affects things as people start coming that hasn't really sunk i see a withdrawal of the troop surge in afghanistan of all the troops in fact how many more times do you think we're going to see things like this emerge i mean because it's been ten years of war we know these aren't the only pictures like this that have been out there right i think there's probably a trove of photographs out there. that would be considered alarming by the pentagon and would be considered warming by any sort of trivialized editors and the reason for that is that it really goes from here in reserve because digital cameras and i don't there are no soldiers here who don't listen to their commanding officers or say don't take any embarrassing photographs because they may end up on the internet or you know that's true of seventeen year olds and it's true of eighteen year old soldiers pictures of the women going to lose photographs and on the internet and so

you know i think we are going to be getting more and more evidence of what war is like in afghanistan than we've been we've had to parents of not just because of the technology but you know i think there's there's a lot still out there oh i think you know it's not only just embarrassing to in terms of publishing photos like this how important is that to get the rest of us to try to understand what the mindset is like what life is like for these people who have actually gone over there and been fighting abroad it's a small portion of the population right but there still are probably almost a million people that have been affected over the last ten years. right it's it's really hard to say what the broader public impact will be you know as you. aeration ago the number of soldiers deployed in vietnam was much much larger and so there was a much broader public understanding of the real rigors of war and right here we're sort of having a media presentation of the rehearsal for and i think it's hard to say what kind of long term effect that's going to have on how the united states thinks about war but

i think it's not going to be good but it's not going to indicate arm i mean it may be good in the sense that it demonstrates the real cost of the real dangers of engaging in military conflict. i want to switch topics real quick at the end here because you are seeing wrote about hillary clinton giving a speech and you know we've been talking a lot united spoken about it let's shift our strategy if you want to talk about the geopolitical areas where we could be focusing now perhaps moving away from the middle east looking more towards asia caring a lot more about concentrating on the air and on the sea in the future and so you said that hillary was pivoting towards the navy can tell us more. but she recently was speech it was part of the forest a lecture series at the naval academy and in this age she laid out a vision of american grand strategy in asia that echoed in a lot of ways to navies and of american grand strategy and it was very you know

obviously she was told going to be something that we want to hear in a place where the navy was but nevertheless the grand strategy she put forward was almost identical to how the navy thinks about politics and how do you think so about its approach to east asia and it was very interesting that it came from the secretary of state and it seemed to me to indicate. that the navy really is sort of the premier strategic service of the united states right now you know there are probably people in the air force who disagreed maybe the army but the same dedication needed that's what secretary clinton that the navy was really central to how she thought about grand strategy especially in the asia pacific all of that's the case what do you think the chances are and why it's danger and reported on this there was a market survey of the navy released and it showed that they were asking defense contractors for their candidates for strike fighter aircraft in the years to come at the same time they're still waiting on this failure of a joint strike fighter program that's caused more than

a trillion dollars to actually come to fruition and be completed and are already asking for another one of the future. the navy is pretty nervous about its version of the f. thirty five partially because the british just are about to cancel their version which is the same point and the navy has really never really liked it whereas one engine and one hundred planes were made well folks and over see they're going to crash into the water and so people have been wondering for a while if the navy was going to try to get a different kind of plane and this may be sort of the first shot over the bow as it were in terms of the navy's search for a different fighter aircraft well i guess they would have you know that asking for . money had been spent but if you're right in terms of hillary clinton everyone else maybe they might be lucky in that sense robert thanks so much for joining us tonight thanks for having me. time for a quick break but when we come back you said it i wrote it and we'll have all the latest on stop cyber spying week then the e.p.a.

released their first today on fracking i think if they don't actually think of that i still want to know if they told. the story. you think you understand it and then. here's the part of it and realized there. was a big. but

in the alone itself you know there's a real headlines with none of the problem with the mainstream media today is that they're completely disconnected from the viewers and from what actually matters to those viewers and so that's why young people just don't watch t.v. anymore if they want news they go online and read it but we're trying to take those stories that people actually care about and transfer them back to t.v. . is this state english speaking russian channel it's kind of like.

russia today has an extremely confrontational stance when it comes to us. ok it's time for you said it i've read it right take time to respond to my brilliance and engage with your comments on facebook twitter and you too because we've got some say i listen now first i want to respond to a viewer that watched monday night's tool time award which we gave to congresswoman fox after she said that she had quote no tolerance for people with student loan debt made to age twenty one twenty one comments on you tube how how does someone like this become the chairwoman for the u.s. house education subcommittee on higher education and workforce training wishing doesn't have the slightest clue about any of it who thinks nothing has even changed in the past forty years says a lot about how we do things here. yeah it does

a lot that this woman who is chair of the committees has been dealing with high to . clearly doesn't understand how the united states works today and it's not just her it's the media it's people across all sorts of calls in making platforms and they're still living in the world that they grew up in a world which is now changed they still think that hard work part time gig can get you through college and probably even get you an easy job there's a little edge in their voice when they talk about today's youth and they just don't get it right that they're just not hardworking or taking on debt because that years but the truth is that times have changed and they're the ones they need to accept it especially if they can be in charge of legislative and next i want to respond to some feedback from our embed two thousand and twelve campaign we launched last night sorry myself and the illustrious jenny churchill stated boycott it on you too they're trying to stop us spreading information are they well they can go themselves i will share this with all my peeps you're doing a great job alone and team piece who imagine commented on you tube i shall embed

this video in protest and then we knew the president was coming are some cubic feet of that is at the lower show shouldn't any church will be naked when slapping the sidewalk concrete in that skit and bed two thousand and twelve not to be a not available for in bed yet well the video is now available for and did so and better way and spread the word oh let's make it famous now finally i want to respond to a viewer that watched my interview last night with republican. ernest welker said on facebook never heard of this secretive organization evidently one of many now goes writing legislation for corporations who fly under the radar thanks again alone for exposing more worthy news at the cowardly and s. and won't now we spoke about last night on the show there are other people out there that are going on this story from the very beginning one of them being artie's tom hartman so if you want to learn more about alec i recommend you check out some of that coverage as well as at my ranting tonight lloyd back with more next week. now continuing our coverage of cyber spying week we've learned that the

white house has stepped in sort of. he was spoken to about the bill on the show this is the one that would allow the government to monitor share hold on to any communications discovered by private companies and quite understandably privacy advocates have been up in arms so many times to shush the outcry that was intelligent committee revise their bill to try and clear a few things up other visions included a new definition of what a cyber threat really is and a requirement for homeland security to have access to all of the data to share with the government but a lot of the opposition has already pointed out that even the slight change in definition for cyber threats they made is still far too broad and a system of versions who will also give people or companies he's guilty to sue the government if it mishandles the information but it still leaves one major question out there unanswered how are we going to know if or when the government makes a mistake if all the surveillance is being done behind closed doors and now as for tim pointed out there was yesterday these are visions aren't enough to stop and

privacy threat. it still unclear about what could or what couldn't beat and then the problem is even if the information originally is some will lead to some sort of cyber security threat what's the government gets an issue they can then use it for other purposes and that hasn't changed yet you're here they narrowed it a little bit back a few weeks ago but so when the government gets the information out just when the copying and settle for just i was treated worse is now a government for national security purposes as well. so lawmakers efforts to rework the bill so far have been a flop and says we can't trust them to fix that the maybe we can rely on the white house to step it do its thing try to stand up for the people come out against this so we can try to stop it all together that's in quite happy now that you see the white house did get its hands on the bill they did criticize the lack of privacy matters but they didn't threaten to veto the bill in fact they didn't even mention it by name and its statement the national security council spokesperson said the

nation's critical infrastructure cyber vulnerabilities will not be addressed by information she. alone legislation without new offer already is to address our nation's critical infrastructure vulnerabilities or legislation that would sacrifice the privacy of our citizens in the name of security will not meet our nation's urgent needs so like i said they spoke out in the name of privacy but they didn't really do anything to actually stand up for it it was a disapproving frown as far as severity goes here and even though they're not down with cispa they're backing another set of proposals been introduced by senators joe lieberman and susan collins now the approached as twenty one zero five now in force protection for critical systems and grant the government a whole new set of powers but it would carry more privacy protection for americans like requiring companies to remove any personal information included in the data before handing it over to the government so blind house might be positioning themselves to look like they're all about protecting your privacy rupie end of the

day they still support the idea of a cyber security bill which is going to expand the government's power and it's just a matter of which one they want to support so it's up to us to raise awareness right not only about this but also about the dangers of all of the competing bills out there right now because if it's not a good bill which none of them are at this point you shouldn't pass it as if it's an emergency and there's no time to get it right. well the president got the official endorsement today of green groups quoting the sierra club the league of conservation voters clean water action and environment america they ahd a conference call this morning with reporters to make sure that this move was known meanwhile the e.p.a. released the first ever federal rules on fracking emissions after delaying those rules four times before now despite a fight with the natural gas industry the e.p.a. has been require that drillers captured gases when they first toppled well this is a move a baby estimate is going to save companies anywhere from eleven to nineteen million dollars annually of all that gas will no longer be escaping however they are

actually letting the industry off the hook until january of twenty fifteen folks there's another move by the government by this administration to try to strike that delicate balance between pleasing environmentalists and the natural gas industry so that's part of who is getting more for their money well joining me from our studio in new york is sarah last contributing editor at good sarah thanks for joining us tonight first of all just tell me a little bit more about these new rules i know that they were trying to get some exemptions for a couple well so they didn't even have to follow the rules at all but the e.p.a. said no dice but i mean how difficult is it to actually go through the process get the right equipment so they can capture this gas before it escapes. right the rules apply across the oil and gas industry but the. environmental groups are particularly excited about the provisions that apply to frac wells now the e.p.a.

estimates as to mates how frakt wells newly frac wells that can use this new technology are already using it so it's not that big of a deal to use it the industry has said that they don't have enough of these trucks basically that they use to capture the gas as it leaks out and they want more time to build the trucks put them to put them together before these rules apply across the board are also nonsense you think you know punting until january of two thousand and thirteen was a fair move by the e.p.a. it makes sense because they actually need the time to build these trucks or did they kind of hate but it definitely was a provision of begats industry was asking for you know industry groups like the american petroleum institute pressing specific this point specifically about there weren't enough. but quit meant there wasn't enough equipment to go around so in that sense the e.p.a. really was responding to industry concerns now what they say is there also are

interest in natural gas companies to flare off the gas if they don't do this process which is called green completion and according to their figures and being the same for nothings in these vaults high organic compounds that are the same it's a little worse for makers oxide another pollutant. but in general you can say that it's an improvement on the status quo but. it would be better if it were happening faster obviously. i know one of the things too that you know given the big push behind the natural gas industry aside from the fact that we happen to have a lot of natural gas to try to try to get to try to drill excuse me here in the united states is the fact that they say that it's at least better than coal it doesn't releases as many greenhouse emissions but then there's been some debate over that lately too has there. yeah that a couple of years ago

a researcher at cornell. a study that said natural gas when you look at it across its life cycle is basically as bad as coal now another study came out recently that said well natural gas isn't quite as bad as coal if you use it for electricity if you use it in trucks and cars like some people were pushing for a few years ago you know it's not worth getting so you know there is this issue with the leaking methane out of the wells methane is natural gas it's the same thing that they're selling but it's also a greenhouse gas that leaks into the atmosphere and it's twenty times as potent as carbon dioxide so anytime you have something like that you want to minimize as much as possible. the new e.p.a. rules do that to a certain extent so you know again that's positive it's better than nothing and it's good there are some regulation of this stuff. it's still an open question like

how much better natural gas is going to be than coal in the long run and if you talk to environmental groups you find that you know they want natural gas to phase out eventually obviously the industry wants to go on as long as possible drilling and making money and so there's this tension there that's not resolved yet we're going to be facing for years to come i think you know given that it's quite a question to you though if if one of the main factors that they used to really push for natural gas is that it's supposed to be better for the environment and it turns out there's some dispute over that you know i think there needs to be a lot more discussion about it but overall right we've seen a lot of natural gas a lot of fracking in particular in the united states and we know the natural gas prices have dropped to the lowest they've been in about a decade but then how does that trickle down to you know the average person you and i do we actually get to see that or does the electric company just get to take advantage of it you know i mean are people's bills going down yet. i don't know actually i haven't done that much reporting on you know that you know in general

natural gas prices are dropping as you said and what it's really a problem for is clean energy you know at the most the more we try and get these clean sources on line like solar wind now they're going to have to be competing with those lower natural gas prices and so you know to be sent to consumers month green energy and in the long term you know our bills are only going to go up if we don't switch over to the sources of clean energy lower gas prices are a problem for industries who are trying to compete. on those counts and then just lastly what about these endorsements from the big green groups that the president got today. it just means ok we're happy with what your doing. i don't think they're necessarily happy with the president is doing but i think you know president obama is a better bet for environmental groups than mitt romney or any of the people who the republicans have put forward so far for their candidate see i mean when you look at

this natural gas issue you see how the environmental groups are sort of trying to play both sides you know on a local level they have a lot of members saying like and natural gas now in washington it's not popular to say natural gas and we want to you know be supporting it in these ways making it possible for the industry to you know x. a little bit better but still go about it a regulator instead of banning i guess the area we got to go because we're going to get catch a break excuse me but thanks for joining us tonight thank you. i will take a quick breather but coming up next entertainment industry is looking to shut down yet another entertainment start up is in the same arguments as they did in one thousand nine hundred four and it will speak to the young turks you are about the return of the shareholder. let's not get the.